# Towards Voluntaryism (Part 9)

in #voluntaryism6 years ago (edited)


2.5. Education: How to Enable Change - Identifying the Achille's Heel

Towards Voluntaryism (Part 9)

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Affecting the changes suggested in section 2.4 is a difficult proposition to tackle in a short period of time, but it does appears feasible to completely revamp most institutions of higher education within four years, even against the will of the administration and faculty. This is because although universities are guided by administration and faculty, in most instances they are actually governed by a Board of Trustees (or Board of Regents or equivalent term) that is advised by a University Senate. All of the above and following recommendations for reforming a college or university would have to be initiated by or pass through the board of trustees and its various committees.

Admittedly, many boards of trustees leave the actual governance and day-to-day decision making to the university president, bureaucrats and faculty leaders while serving primarily as cheerleaders or using the position strictly as one of prestige signaling while leaving the heavy lifting to others. This must however change. Without a complacent, cooperative or even activist board of trustees, none of the behavior we see manifesting on university campuses today could have come about, much less be sustained after such public relations disasters as have been seen in the last years.

Identifying the Achilles' Heel of the Radical Ideologues Populating Universities


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As the recent case at the University of Nebraska has demonstrated, the faculty and administration fostering these irrational and hateful environments are aware of the tenuousness of their actual hold on power. Following the harassment of a conservative student by multiple faculty members at the University of Nebraska, three state senators wrote an open letter questioning the university's treatment of conservative students. The backlash from the university faculty reveals the Achille's Heel of the Cultural Marxist demagogues running the universities.

As the letter details:

"We fear that financial hostage-taking by members of the state government will result in changes by the administration in the intellectual offerings of the University and opportunities for our students... We insist that no radical changes be undertaken in the administration, academic programs, allocation of funds, or support for campus initiatives without appropriate faculty governance, transparency, and respect for academic freedom, which are core values of a healthy university.

...Their (the elected Governor and Senators of Nebraska) lack of consistency in protecting and respecting students’ political views, particularly those that diverge from their own, reveals the political nature of this manufactured crisis. In contrast, we reaffirm what has always been our educational mission: helping students to understand a wide variety of ideas and viewpoints through the many classes they take, with the goal of producing informed citizens capable of making thoughtful independent decisions about how best to govern our society."

That this is formulated by the apologists of those who actually perpetrated the bullying and abuse of a conservative student can only be considered a case of extreme - and pitifully dimwitted - hypocrisy. The rest of the letter is clearly trying to protect the social justice agenda that is apparently in full swing at the University of Nebraska by claiming the reaction to the bullying is a "manufactured crisis" and that "politicized interventions in the work of the university must be condemned and resisted." That the social justice agenda in university spaces is itself politicized intervention writ large never seems to occur to them. Now that is blatantly audacious hypocrisy.

This is underscored by the fact that they actually claim their actions have the "goal of producing citizens capable of making thoughtful independent decisions about how best to govern our society." That is an explicit declaration of political intent by the faculty, meaning they want to influence the political environment but not be subject to it. The postmodernist doublethink is so transparent that only a product of the indoctrination centers could consider the argument credible given the circumstances. Hubris of this sort is not only intellectually indefensible but morally reprehensible.

Nevertheless, we should be thankful for their sanctimoniousness Pharisaism. For what is revealed here is the Achilles' heel of the social justice advocates and Cultural Marxists who are destroying the public universities: The Board of Trustees.

The Board of Trustees


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The board of trustees at a public university or college is typically beholden to the democratically elected political operatives of each state. The board of trustees delegates funding to the various programs and departments that comprise a university. The last thing a university faculty and its administration wants is that the population of their state realizes they can use their democratic majority to affect real change at the universities by expressing their political will to their elected representatives (i.e. the Governor and state senators) who can influence composition of the board of trustees and snip their purse strings.

This has also been viewed as a remedy to free speech issues on campus, as detailed in this article by The College Fix: Scholars: Withholding federal funds will help fight viewpoint discrimination on campus. Federal funds are not enough however, it is the state purse that is the majority of funding for state universities that needs to be targeted.

If attempts at restoring individual colleges and universities from the inside (as will be discussed as an alternative in sections 2.7-2.9) are unsuccessful due to entrenched opposition, the local communities and state constituency may well be obliged to escalate to the purely political realm. A petition and referendum to revoke the charter of public colleges and universities that engage in, tolerate or advocate illegal or unconstitutional activities as unfit for service is a very real alternative. Besides harboring those who have committed crimes, the restriction of free speech would appear to be the clearest avenue for citizen activists to pursue in seeking to hold public universities accountable to the public interest.

It is also worth considering that in many states, the governor has to provide his signature and the seal of the state for a college degree certificate or diploma to be valid. Recalling a governor who continues to sign diplomas from universities advocating or participating in illegal activity may be worth investigating. Nothing makes politicians listen more than it being their ass on the line.

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At the very least, it should be possible to shutter, defund or hinder those liberal arts departments that are the most egregious perpetrators until such time as they revise their curriculum and/or faculty. Such action would also force non-SJW faculty and staff to dispose of the irredeemable elements to save the institution as a whole. This should be easily feasible in "red" states where university campuses have become hotspots for Marxist political indoctrination and activism. It should also be easily achievable in blue states whose populations are still classical liberals (i.e. believe in free speech, democracy, American values of equality, liberty and justice).

If the local populations realize that the parents paying for their children's education and tax-paying residents can actively influence the political and demographic composition of the universities that have almost completely isolated themselves from the surrounding population/community, especially in conservative regions, it may well save higher education from itself.

In the following section, we will treat the board of trustees in more detail.

Next: Towards Voluntaryism (Part 10) - 2.7 Education: Reforming the Board of Trustees
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